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The Effect of the Development of Innovative Science Teaching Material on Instruction in Elementary SchoolsLiu, Kun-shia 21 February 2005 (has links)
Innovation of science and technology is the impetus for the promotion of human civilization, and the fostering of innovators of science and technology has become an important educational goal in the era of knowledge economy. The purpose of the present study is to mobile the teachers, who have long supervised students in science exhibition competition, to develop innovative science teaching material, and to conduct an instruction experiment to examine the effect of such a material on elementary pupils¡¦ creativity, problem solving, and science subject performance.
The instruments of the present study include 1) Creativity Test (Verbal-bamboo chopsticks, figure-¤H) developed by Wu, et al. (1998), 2 )Creative Problem Solving Test, and Subject Knowledge and Concept Test developed by researchers (2002).
The study consists of three stages. Firstly, a team of ¡§Innovative Science Teaching Material¡¨ is organized by 7 elementary school science teachers with average 20 years of working experience, five of which have been awarded as the first rank more than five times in science exhibition competitions held for elementary schools in Kaohsiung. An appropriate Creative Thinking Instruction Model (CTIM) is constructed through panel discussion and shared teaching expertise on weekly basis in a 17-week period, and teaching material is developed on the basis of the constructed CTIM.
Secondly, an experiment is conducted to test the effect of the developed teaching material. The three teachers in the treatment group will receive a 3-day instruction demonstration and reflection from the workshop by the team of ¡§Innovative Science Teaching Material,¡¨ while the three teachers in the contrasted group do not. Then, a total of 206 fifth grade pupils in three Kaoshiung elementary schools are selected, on a quasi-experiment design, with pre-, and post tests on unequal number subjects, for the treatment group in a 10-week-session innovative instruction . Third, a follow up test is done 6 months after the experiment. The data are analyzed through One-Way MANCOVA to test the effect of the innovative science teaching material on pupils¡¦ learning.
The results indicate that¡G1) a general consensus is reached by the team of ¡§Innovative Science Teaching Material,¡¨ through 17 panel discussions, and the essentials of Inquiry approach and STS(Science/Technology/Society) approach are combined on the basis of CTIM, which then be classified into ¡§Creativity of teachers,¡¨ and ¡§Creativity of the pupils, ¡¨ which were further differentiated into six steps: setting design, problem finding, hypothesis formation, testing design, results interpretation, and application promotion, which form an instruction loop; 2) On instruction effect, students in the experimental group perform better on verbal creativity, figure creativity, problem solving competence, and global science subject knowledge than those in the contrasted group; 3) On the follow up test (6 months after the experiment), students in the experimental group perform better on verbal fluency and verbal originality creativity than those in the contrasted group, which indicates a lasting effect of the instruction, but there is no significant difference between subjects.
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